


Baby Mine

by amorremanet



Series: Whither thou goest, I will go also. [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Child Death, Community: hc_bingo, Community: homebrewbingo, F/M, Fake Character Death, Gen, Hunting, Kidnapping, M/M, Noncanonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary used to think that nothing could be worse than her children growing up as hunters—but that was before a demon stole her baby boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby Mine

**Author's Note:**

> prompts used: "theft" for hc_bingo, "violent feelings" for homebrewbingo, and "bruises/wounds" also for homebrewbingo.

Azazel doesn't just bleed in Sam Winchester's mouth on the second of November, and he doesn't burn Mary Winchester on the ceiling. No one notices that anything's wrong at all until morning, when Mary goes to feed and change her infant son and, in his place, finds a corpse. Samuel Jonathan Winchester is pronounced dead on arrival at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.

By all appearances, the dead baby is exactly the same as Sam. Same height, same weight, same hair color. Doctor Davidson, the Winchesters' pediatrician, can't even tell the difference. The coroner's report that he delivers to the grief-stricken parents is simple: sudden infant death syndrome—nothing could've been done to save Sam from it; no one even knows why it happens; it's unfortunate, they have his condolences.

They have a closed-casket funeral, but Mary isn't convinced that her son is dead. She saw the lights flicker that night when she got up to check on Dean. She smells the sulfur in Sam's bedroom for weeks. She remembers finally scratching away the devil's traps that protected her house, and she knows that she should have known better than to try any of this. She should've known better than getting comfortable in this apple-pie life. Hunters never get out of the life. It follows you everywhere, and it always ends bloody.

John Winchester sees his wife slipping away from him and can't do anything to stop it. She tells him about what she grew up with, about the things that are out there in the dark and the things her parents trained her to hunt, to kill. Everything she says leaves him with the sensation of getting smacked upside the head, which doesn't go away when Missouri Moseley confirms what Mary's said. John doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't know how he feels about any of it.

But he made a vow on the day that he took Mary Campbell to be his wife. He still remembers every word of the Old Testament passage that she picked out for their ceremony: _whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God… if ought but Death part thee and me_ — **'til death do us part**.

Shortly after Dean's fifth birthday, the Winchesters pack up and leave Lawrence, primarily living on the road. They get rid of their house, they quit their jobs, they turn John's '67 Impala into a home and squeak out a living in motel rooms when it's not big enough. Eventually, they find some homesteads—Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Bobby Singer makes a home with Rufus Turner; Harvelle's Roadhouse, where Dean takes to seeing little Joanna Beth Harvelle as his sister; the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, where Jim Murphy offers other hunters shelter from whatever storms they get themselves into.

Mary teaches John everything her parents taught her, and eventually, they pass that knowledge on to Dean. Because Mary used to think that nothing could be worse than her children growing up as hunters, but that was before a demon stole her baby boy.

  
*******   


The only mercy that she finds in this life—in how quickly she picks up knives, in how she takes to packing shotgun shells with rock salt as though she never stopped—is that Dean's still too young to understand it. Maybe he doesn't get to have a normal childhood. Maybe he doesn't get a childhood, period, the way that Mary didn't. But at least he can still sleep soundly for a while, thinking that the monsters in the darkness are just scary stories.

John disagrees with that assessment. He doesn't see any kind of point in keeping Dean in the dark. What if the demon that took Sammy comes back for Dean? What if Dean's in danger, too? What if their whole family's in danger now, and they don't come back from a hunt some day, and then what's going to happen to Dean? What'll he do if he doesn't know what's going on in his life, Mary? Or what if he's smarter than they ever give kids credit for, and sees something that John and Mary miss—something big, something that helps them find Sam quicker and get their family life back on track?

They're staying in a room at the Roadhouse tonight, and this marks the only time that Mary ever raises a hand to her husband. She smacks him across the cheek and hisses for him to _shut up before the other hunters hear us_ —because John might've been a Marine, but his life before he became a soldier? Was being a mechanic. The life he tried to run to after he came home from Vietnam? Was being a mechanic. The only thing anybody taught or expected him to be? Was a _mechanic_. Mary's been a soldier, a hunter, for her entire life. Even when she was a mother, she couldn't shake what she'd been born into, what she'd been spoon-fed through her girlhood. She knows this community and the people in it.

And Mary Gwendolyn Campbell Winchester knows better than to trust that all hunters will be on the level, and she won't have any of them getting in between her and what she wants, a family that's back together again.

She sighs, then, and kisses John on the still-red mark where her hand hit his skin. She says that she's sorry for snapping, but in return, John tells her that no, she's not, and she doesn't have to be. Because she's right: he doesn't know this world, or how to navigate it, or the most basic means of finding his bearings in it. He doesn't know these people or their culture. The only war he's ever fought was one that should never have happened in the first place.

But Mary can't ask John to let her shoulder this burden alone. She can't do that to him. Put everything on his shoulders. Throw him into the deep end, tell him to swim, and hope for the best. _Teach him what's going on in their lives now_ , even if she doesn't think he needs to hear it. Even if it's not his burden to bear. If they can't tell Dean what's going on—still sleeping like a blonde little angel on the bed they'll all be sharing tonight—then Mary can at least trust John with it.

He's her husband, for better _and_ for worse, and they'll get Sam back. John knows they will. But they have to trust each other, first—Mary has to let John know more than the bare minimum.

She sighs, snaking an arm around his shoulders, lacing the other hand's fingers up with his. "You're lucky you're still a good shot, Winchester," she whispers into his mouth, "or I'd be leaving you in the car half the time."

  
*******  


Dean's seven when he starts piecing things together, figuring out that his life isn't normal. When he starts asking why his family has to move around all the time.

Asking where Mom and Dad go when they leave him with their friends. Asking about all the time he has to spend with his "Uncle" Bobby and "Uncle" Rufus, or with Pastor Jim, who's nice and an Episcopalian priest, but doesn't have the same stories that Pastor Wallace back in Lawrence did.

Asking why he's allowed to call him Pastor Jim, because it doesn't make sense that some priests get called by their first names and others don't. Asking why Pastor Jim doesn't have the same stories as Pastor Wallace did, the ones about his Mom and Dad's wedding or the early years of their marriage or how they're more in love than any other couple he's had the chance to join in wedded bliss.

Not that Dean exactly minds not hearing the stories that his sometimes-babysitter has to tell instead of the wedding stories. Pastor Jim's stories aren't as cool as Uncle Bobby's stories or Uncle Rufus's, but they're still cooler than Pastor Wallace's. They're are all about ghosts and werewolves and monsters, which are all cooler things than Dean's parents' wedding and don't make them get all gross and lovey-dovey, making kissy faces at each other.

But Dean's parents haven't made gross kissy faces at each other in what Dean's pretty sure counts as forever. And it doesn't make sense for some priests to have different stories, because don't they have to go to some special Priest School? Doesn't Priest School teach them all the same stories? Shouldn't every priest be able to tell Dean about his parents' wedding and if not, then _why_?

Dean's seven-and-a-half when, one Sunday morning, John and Mary come back to Sioux Falls from a hunt, and get dragged into Bobby's study before they can even see their son. Instead of finding Dean in front of the TV, they find a worried, angry hunter, telling them where their son is and how they ought to be raising him. Rufus, Bobby explains, is sitting with Dean out in the backyard—and John and Mary have to stop pussy-footing around and tell their kid what's up in the world.

While his parents were gone, off hunting some restless spirit a few states over, Dean got himself into Bobby's library, started pawing through all of Bobby's books and asking if the things in there were real. If Rufus hadn't stopped him and gotten the book away, Dean might've summoned a goddamn demon. Dean's pronunciation was all off and he had no idea what he was saying in Latin, _and that's exactly the problem with what happened_. John and Mary can't keep jerking their kid around like this.

Dean's eight when he packs his first rock-salt round, and eight when he first wraps his little hands around a pistol, and eight when he shoots down a line of empty beer cans in Bobby and Rufus's backyard, where not six months before, he used to run around, pretending to be Captain Kirk. He learns Latin from his Uncle Bobby, but not because he wants to translate _The Aeneid_ or Cicero; he learns it because he wants to know what the exorcism spell means in English.

And Dean's ten when his whining and nagging finally make his parents—more like his father—give in and take him along on a hunt. He's on midwinter break from school, and it's a routine salt-and-burn, anyway. Nothing to write home about. And through every agonizing, dragging moment of it, Mary feels her heart breaking. She wants to send Dean back to the Impala. She wants to tell him not to pick up the shovel and help his father dig up a grave.

She wants to hold her little boy to her chest and weep, because they might not have found his brother yet, but even so? No matter what rage, what lust for vengeance, burns inside of Mary's chest, she wanted better for her Dean than this.


End file.
